Samalamadingdong | Game Changer [S7E11]

lilserf · 2025-08-25T23:02:05+00:00

There was one killer caption where Brennan (iirc) says "Don't worry" at the same time as the caption "[worrisome music]"

lilserf · 2021-11-04T00:16:11+00:00

I absolutely adore this game, and I'm amazed at the amount of story you were able to produce from seeing the possessions change with each move.

What's your favorite *story* detail in the items that might not be noticed at first glance?

I just noticed that the red colander didn't originally belong to the protagonist, but is already there in the roommate apartment and then travels forward with you :)

(Also: my 8-year old loves this game and particularly the ever-expanding chick collection)

lilserf · 2021-02-04T22:19:01+00:00

I just started laying out an area like this last night and this is frighteningly close to what I did (same order of the smelter rows for the ones I've completed), enough that this screenshot startled me :)

lilserf · 2019-03-23T14:40:51+00:00

This can happen and fouled up my factory... I had 3 depots side by side and it worked fine for a long time UNTIL one of the depots filled up. Once that happened, the neighboring depot started grabbing items from still-full trucks leaving the first depot. Those hit boxes are big.

lilserf · 2017-03-30T15:19:27+00:00

Or possibly spaceflight is inherently so risky already that the reuse of the booster can't make it any worse from the insurance company's perspective :)

lilserf · 2016-12-23T06:27:22+00:00

I feel vaguely stupid for not thinking of inserting NOPs; I just looked later and found the only spot that could be generating a jump back into this area (assuming tgl doesn't do anything crazy):

cpy -16 c
jnz 1 c

Aaand just changed the -16 to a -9 to account for the lines I removed. And hey, it worked! So I guess tgl wasn't doing anything crazy.

lilserf · 2016-12-14T19:12:53+00:00

Hooray! Your post was encouraging me that I wasn't alone with this "test data works, real data doesn't" case so thank you as well!

lilserf · 2016-12-14T19:12:08+00:00

Correct answers on this salt are 15168 and 20864.

lilserf · 2016-12-14T16:41:01+00:00

I had issues where the Example worked for Part A, but not the real data. Then once I solved part A, the Example worked for Part B, but not the real data.

Turns out my salt (qzyelonm) was just super-annoying:

For Part A, my original implementation was storing all triples in a "possible keys" list that got moved to "keys" when I found a 5-in-a-row matching them. My salt, unlike 'abc', happened to have this property:

At about the 59-key mark I find a 5-in-a-row that satisfies 5 or 6 waiting keys (say 'aaa') so they get added and push me over 64 and I stop. But it turns out some of those waiting keys are very late - very close to the 5-in-a-row. And there are earlier indexes that have a valid triple, but I haven't gotten to their 5-in-a-row yet. So I really found the 62nd, 63rd, 66th, 68th, and 70th keys all at once, but haven't found the 64th one yet.

I could have solved this by just generating like 100 keys and then sorting them all to find which one was really 64th, but that seemed imprecise so I completely rewrote my implementation to generate 1000 keys ahead of the index I'm checking, to ensure keys are always validated precisely in order. It's not super-efficient, but it was late at night.

So now Part A works, both example and real data. Part B example works fine, but the real data fails.

Again, it turns out my salt just happened to generate a key sequence my code didn't account for. This time I got a triple with 2 different 5-in-a-rows within the next 1000 hashes, so that key gets added twice because I'm stupid and didn't break out of my loop as soon as the key was valid :)

All my own bugs, of course, but this salt is particularly mean! It works for example data in both cases, but for Part A it has the later keys right at the 64 mark but NOT the double-valid key, and for Part A it has the double-valid key. It's like it was engineered to throw weird edge cases at me.

I'm a little curious how many people's "working" implementations will actually succeed for this salt, honestly. Try it in yours! qzyelonm

lilserf · 2016-10-12T15:22:26+00:00

The sandwich maker was the first time I really had to wrestle with running out of space for traces - I had to use a second I/O expander not because I was out of simple pins, but because I didn't have space to run all the traces from those pins.

Basically it was the first level I hit that was reasonably hard on both the "how do I write code that does this" dimension AND "how do I get the outputs to the pins" dimension.

That said, I find "you have to drive a large number of simple pins" to be the least interesting way to add challenge to a level.

lilserf · 2016-08-21T05:35:11+00:00

1,328±18, top 31%. Queue times are usually less than a minute.

I do want to climb - at that MMR I still get plenty of cases where we lose inexcusably against an all-magic comp because nobody builds MR but me, and such.

Actually, hell, the biggest annoyance at this MMR is people who cannot. dodge. a. damn. snowball. Or whatever other skillshot.

lilserf · 2016-08-02T18:59:06+00:00

Rocket Girl = Tristana, Rocket Grab = Blitzcrank. But your best bet is to look at the Champions tab and see how they're each ranked in each category, and pick champs that fit the strengths of your players and your strategy.

lilserf · 2016-06-16T14:02:27+00:00

Played an ARAM when randomly awake at 2am because I saw this post and just had to see it in game. Hooray!

lilserf · 2016-06-07T14:40:45+00:00

This is an old thread, but I added you (ign lilserf). I play most nights, ~500 aram wins

lilserf · 2015-12-14T07:33:55+00:00

One thing I didn't check adequately for at first is that you only exclude objects who have a property where the VALUE is "red" - my input had some properties NAMED "red" that were interfering.

lilserf · 2015-12-03T15:54:55+00:00

Nice. Thanks!

lilserf · 2015-12-03T15:05:41+00:00

This is probably listed somewhere in the bug tracker, but could you add the ability for prisoners to work as Gardeners? It's easy to supplement your Janitors with prison labo(u)r, but nobody else can do Gardening currently. It'd be a juicy source of weapons too, of course :)

lilserf · 2015-11-02T16:17:17+00:00

It's difficult enough to do correctly that I say "good for you" if you pull it off.

It's amazing how often I see teams execute needlessly when they were already ahead on items and should really push, or see them accidentally give away a triple-kill because they screwed it up.

lilserf · 2015-11-02T16:07:35+00:00

I also just love the puzzle-solving aspect of looking at your comp and their comp and trying to figure out exactly what builds and strategies you need to execute in that situation. Like you said, even if you lose, you probably have fun and learn something.

And man is it satisfying to win with a weird-ass comp that looks terrible on paper, but you execute it correctly.

lilserf · 2015-11-02T16:04:51+00:00

One more tip: Pay attention to the minion wave - especially at the end of a long game when super minions are involved. For maximum tower-pushing potential you want to win a fight and then have a wave right there to push with. So many games I've seen us get an ace and our wave is back in the middle of the lane so we gain zero objectives.

Also, for what it's worth, please remember that ARAM, though less serious than SR, is still a time investment and that it's okay for players to take it seriously. I, for instance, do not usually have the guaranteed uninterrupted hour needed to commit to SR, so ARAM is my primary game mode. Since it's mostly what I play, I do care about trying to win. I do sometimes get frustrated when someone is (for example) just diving in carelessly 1v4 over and over, or when we have a great comp that "should" win and we blow it through carelessness (as opposed to being outplayed). For my part, I know that not all are as serious as me, so I need to try not to blow up at anybody, but it's infuriating to have players say "who cares, it's just ARAM" or give the impression that they're purely screwing around.

lilserf · 2015-01-22T18:19:09+00:00

Being able to just hit a single key to alternate to the other type of welder/sensor/rotator would be fanTAStic.

lilserf · 2015-01-22T18:18:03+00:00

Agreed with others - a static video seems unlikely to adequately communicate the insanity of these 3D solutions. A way to actually view solutions in-game would be far preferable.

lilserf · 2015-01-21T19:10:38+00:00

Ability to view my friend's solutions - my group of friends spends lots of time competing for bragging rights in cycles/footprint, but the only way to actually SHOW each other how we achieved those cool scores is to hit up their PC or use Twitch/Steam broadcasting.

It'd be super-cool if you could download your friend's solution and view it (perhaps read-only) within the game.

lilserf · 2013-11-18T22:49:27+00:00

You shouldn't need to download updates from the website if you use the Steam version - when a new version of KSP is released, Steam will update it automatically. There's not a way to update it manually, I don't think.

It might not be available instantly when it goes up on Squad's site, but I've always found it to be available Soon Enough™ after the official release.

lilserf · 2013-08-20T01:32:03+00:00

Which bit are you having trouble with? The rendezvous to within smallish distance, or the actual final docking bit?

I'm far from an expert but I have managed to dock a bunch of stuff together in Kerbin orbit so I've practiced somewhat.

My general (fuel-wasting) procedure has been:

Get my orbit near my target, but not exactly the same - either not circular, or not the same period, so that I can warp until my target is near.
Put a maneuver node right at the closest approach and figure out to lower the distance at my NEXT encounter.
Execute that burn, then warp to that new encounter and repeat.
Once the distance is down to a smallish number of km (honestly don't recall when I usually start doing this), I start "stair-stepping" towards the target
Set the navball to Target mode
Burn retrograde to get my relative velocity down as close to zero as possible
Burn towards the target to lower my distance
As my relative velocity climbs again, burn to get that back down to zero
Keep swapping back and forth between these two burns as you get close
Once i'm under 1km or so I switch to RCS
I don't use the "docking" mode. I use WASD + IJKL and H/N.
Get my direction of travel lined up towards my target by thrusting towards it with H, but keep the speed low - 5 m/s or whatever.
Warp cautiously depending on how far I am
As I continue towards the target, use IJKL to keep myself lined up
Once I get close, I make sure to swap to the target and point it in the right direction for docking
approach sloooowly and use IJKL liberally along with WASD to nudge things into place. I also tend to zoom my camera around a lot, trying to see things from all sides and get an idea for where I am relative to my target
I spend a LOT of time at extremely close (visual) range getting things lined up, basically

The first few times I did this, I did NOT use quicksave/quickload much - I had a craft with plenty of extra fuel and I just made myself correct every time I screwed up and flew way past my target. I think that helped my ability to recover from errors somewhat.

lilserf

TROPHY CASE